The mayor of an Ohio city where a 15-year-old boy was fatally shot by police on Thanksgiving said body camera videos raised “serious questions” about what he called a “deeply troubling” homicide.
A lawyer for victim Jazmir Tucker’s family also alleged that authorities “did a number of things tactically wrong in this case” and “came out with the intent to do one thing, shoot and kill.”
Akron Mayor Malik Shammas said Friday that he was “left with many serious questions” after watching “several videos from this incident,” according to a statement posted online by Cleveland TV station WEWS.
Shammas said the first two officers at the scene “did not activate their body cameras upon exiting their vehicle” but that “the cameras were automatically activated due to the presence of a nearby cruiser with activated lights.”
The cameras only recorded 30 seconds of video without audio, Shammas said, “so we have some video, without audio, of the shooting itself.”
Shammas also said that “it’s hard to make out from the videos what exactly happened leading up to the shooting and immediately following it.”
“A gun was recovered from Jazmir’s zipped-up jacket pocket. Given that, why did the officer decide to use his weapon?” he said.
The teen was shot shortly after 11 p.m. on Nov. 28 after the officers heard gunfire while on patrol, spotted Tucker and chased after him.
The unidentified officer who shot Tucker fired about seven shots from a rifle in three seconds but his arms and weapon blocked the view of his camera, concealing whatever the teen was doing before he was killed, according to the Associated Press.
Shammas also said that “the amount of time that expired between the shooting and the initiation of physical aid to Jazmir is deeply troubling to me,” WEWS said.
“I want to be clear that any unreasonable delay in the rendering of aid by police officers is unacceptable and has no place in Akron,” he said.
Lawyers representing Tucker’s family allege that the teen didn’t receive any first aid for 10 minutes, with lawyer Robert Greshem saying that “the police department did a number of things tactically wrong in this case, starting with the aggressiveness that they initiated this pursuit.”
“These officers came out with the intent to do one thing, shoot and kill,” Greshem said during a Friday news conference, according to a statement posted on his firm’s website.
Greshem also claimed that “there’s a culture of violence in this particular police department” and another family lawyer, Stanley Jackson, alleged that department had “weaponized” the officers against Tucker because he was a young Black male.
“You give someone a high-powered rifle, and then they’re not properly trained, and there’s a culture to assault and kill Black males—that’s the tragedy,” Jackson said.
Originally published by Latin Times
